Call for D*I*Y Education Pack Ideas

There’s a little light at the end of the tunnel with regard to my workload, so I’m taking this time to mention the status of the D*I*Y Planner.

First, there is still no version 2.0 of OpenOffice.org yet, so my template kit is still pending its “any day now” release. I am quite encouraged by the drawing tools in the beta, but the program still rather buggy at this time.

Second, my focus for the next while will be on “add-on” packages for the D*I*Y Planner which would be targeted towards more specialised users. The first two will be Education and Creativity. I’m still very much in the embryonic stages of what’s to be included, and how they will be structured.

Which brings me to the reason for this post: are there any students and teachers out there who have ideas about what you’d like to see in the D*I*Y Education Package? Currently, I only have the following templates in process:

Lesson Plan

Unit Plan

Course Overview

Materials

Bibliography (MLA), including an index card variant

HowTo: MLA Citations

Timetable, both five-day and blank versions

A marking template or two

Attendance

Perhaps some new brainstorming charts?

I lean towards the arts, not the sciences, so MLA is my first choice for documenting sources. That being said, I can see no reason why I couldn’t create other styles while I’m at it. I would like a few pros to double-check my work, though.

If you have any suggestions for additional templates, I’d love to hear from you: please leave a comment below or send me an email. (My address is found at the bottom of the menu at right.) Scholars, educators, students and educational methodologies being what they are, I sincerely doubt that these templates will suit everybody’s needs, but I’m trying to ensure that I take into account as many as possible. Your feedback is thus very important to me.

11 Comments

Katrina

May 26, 2005

Some rubric templates and/or sample rubrics for grading essays. Rubistar and a couple of other sites have customizable templates — and it’s really only a matter of creating a table in your word processing program, but the profs in my program made a huge deal about the importance of rubrics.

And maybe some kind of a cheat sheet for creating tests with descriptions of the different types of tests.

(I’m going to be doing my student teaching in the fall, but I suspect those are things that I might find handy.)

I have written a post on my blog with a fews thought on this superb idea

david meadows

May 30, 2005

Assuming you’re aiming at teachers as well(of which I am one), some cards which I’ve developed which you might want to include:

A student info card (with spaces for name, address, contact info (parents), email address, allergies, whether they take the bus or not, whether they’re youngest or only or not), etc.

A contact record card (mine has a symbol for a phone or @ to indicate whether the contact was via phone or email; plus an indication of course of who it was and what it was about)

a similar card for notes made at meetings of various kinds

A card to keep track of things others have borrowed from you or your room

a similar card to keep track of things you have borrowed from others and (if applicable) with a space for a due date when they should be returned

an @photocopier card and an @computer lab card for activities which have to be done while in those places

… there are a couple of others that I have in mind (that I’ve never done myself), but the bell just rang and I’ve got to get back to work!

regards,

dm

david meadows

May 30, 2005

… forgot to mention; it might be nice to have a bit wider margin on one side for folks (like me) who use a small binder for keeping ‘long term’ cards in.

dm

chevauchee

June 9, 2005

Possibly a specialized contact sheet for group projects, with the bottom half being that person’s responsibilities and deadlines? And possibly one for individual projects? I’ve actually been using the goal planning page for this — class in the goal line, mission has brief information (due date, page length, expectations) and long-range goal has my topic. Tasks are listed normally. Maybe slap “Assignments” on the next actions template as well.

That’s the best I can come up with. Hope it helps!

klezmercat

June 13, 2005

I’m a high school English teacher, and I was thinking of having my students keep a vocabulary log as they read (both required reading and for-pleasure reading). You know, with the page number, word, part of speech, and definition (s) Room for synonyms might be nice. (Raising my students’ vocabulary level is something I really struggle with, but I hate taking it out of context. I prefer making them read as much as possible and placing words from the reading on reading quizzes, but most of them still do not take the time to look up words. This is why I’m considering the required vocab. log.

Other note-taking forms for reading literature would also be helpful — perhaps separate forms for poetry and prose fiction. There are some “dialectical journal” models out there that you could look at. If a vocabulary log were integrated with this, there would need to be room for both denotation and connotation.

Ray Cheshire

June 20, 2005

I run a busy science dept in the UK and as such try to fill the dual roles of leader/manager and teacher. Having looked through your suggestions and looked at some of your fantastic creations I can come up with only one addition to the educators pack: resources for practical subjects.
Take my subject, science, for example: I regulalrly order various pieces of apparatus for any experiments my students need. A card with title, room, class, number of kits required, apparatus, risk assessments etc would be most useful.
Thanks!

I’m homeschooling and have made pages for Field Trips (gone on and ideas for, Books Read, Books to Read (one for my daughter and one for me) school supplies, curriculum needs, websites. Honestly though… I just add whatever kind of page I need when I need it. It’s fairly easy to set up my own templates in Word or print scheduling pages from Outlook. Lesson planning and scheduling templates would be nice though, because they are so specialized and would take a lot of time for me to make myself. I think I’m going to make a separate hipster pda just for homeschooling.

monky

May 24, 2006

Student behavior tracking, or maybe an incident report log? – Our SpEd dept. is brand new and has yet to institute any form of discipline or stable records program, and reliably logging how often Johnny wets his pants, or tries to choke another kid is tough at best, but with a thousand near-identical emergencies happening at once, getting to keep the days straight is near impossible…. Maybe a column for name, another for an abbreviated summary, and some record of followup with the support staff, CPS, psychiatrist, etc. ; what kind of intervention was used, results, blah blah… Even a Rule Infraction Tracker, or a Summary of Day journal would rule, with room for assignments, off-topic notes, incidents, and particular student goal tracking… Anything to make IEPs and documentation less painful… Awesome work, btw—thank you!